This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
In the dead of winter, and at the risk of sounding like George Will, a baseball tale:
A long time ago, Greg Goossen, widely thought to be a goofy guy, even for a baseball player, was catching in a minor league baseball game. The batter bunted to the pitcher.
Goossen yelled, "First base! First base!" because he saw that was where the pitcher had the best chance to throw to get a runner out. Instead, the pitcher threw to second base and everybody was safe. Goossen was upset that the pitcher had ignored his advice.
From the opposing dugout, another player named Jim Bouton (who later recorded all this in the wonderful 1970 memoir, "Ball Four") called out, "Goose, he had to consider the source."
When The Salt Lake Tribune, or any newspaper, publishes quotes or op-ed contributions from various folks, an effort is made to give the reader at least a hint as to what motivations those people might have. Speakers and authors are described by such things as party affiliation, ideological bent, educational background or employer. It's a way for readers to consider the source as they decide how much, if any, weight to give the views they read.
Wednesday's Tribune included an op-ed submitted by two scholars from a Logan-based think tank called Strata, an unofficial spin-off from the economics faculty at Utah State University.
The gist of it: Taxpayer subsidies to alternative energy companies, those that sell solar or wind generating systems or power therefrom, are bad. They are bad because those operations gain an unfair advantage in what should be a pure free-market competition against poor little Rocky Mountain Power and its much cheaper source of electricity — mostly coal.
The online response to it: The Tribune is bad. It is bad because we ran the piece, by USU Professor Ryan Yonk and student researcher Josh Smith, or because we published it without informing readers that Strata is a creature of the evil Koch brothers.
Those are the guys from Kansas who spend millions upon millions to advocate for dirty energy and a totally unregulated market. They provided the seed money for Strata and have given, according to the environmental watchdogs at Greenpeace, $1.6 million to various programs and positions at USU between 2005 and 2013.
After getting some reader blowback from a previous Strata op-ed, we asked the thinkers in that tank about the Koch connection, whether it was ongoing and should be disclosed. We were told that Strata has many sources of funding these days that they would prefer not to detail.
Fine. We publish opinions representing all sorts of views all the time. We don't have the time, or perhaps even the right, to ask each of them for a full disclosure of all their funders.
The views expressed can rise or fall on their own, depending on whether they make sense and are intellectually honest.
Which the Yonk and Smith piece clearly didn't, and wasn't.
Some 600 words of free-market, fossil-fuel propaganda and not one syllable noting that RMP is the beneficiary of something much more valuable than any taxpayer subsidy, and that's its status as a regulated utility, totally walled off from anything resembling real competition.
Not a word acknowledging that governments often subsidize things that are for the greater good — highways, the rural electric grid, the Military Industrial Complex, that Transcontinental Railroad that's a big part of Utah history — when it has been determined that the private sector won't, or won't do it soon enough.
No mention that energy sources that do not wreck the global climate and scar the insides of your lungs might be a worthy recipient of such subsidies.
Total denial of the fact that fossil fuels today receive an estimated $34 billion a year in subsidies from the American taxpayer alone, $400 billion across the G-20 nations and, according to the International Monetary Fund, $5.3 trillion globally. And that doesn't count the externalized costs, all the illness, early deaths and environmental degradation caused by the extraction, processing and use of fossil fuels.
Actually, all that was clear to any discerning reader of the Strata piece, even without a note as to who pays the bills in Logan. I just wanted you to see that I know which base to throw to.
George Pyle, a Tribune editorial writer, has read "Ball Four" at least five times. gpyle@sltrib.com